rodarin

so many people claiming hundreds of hours in this game already is hilarious or even into the 1000s. Game has been live since what the 22nd? Whats that 15 or 16 days (not counting all the down time servers have had. So the most time anyone can have in this game if they never logged out (which some dont just to AFK level) would be around 384 hours. I dont think the servers have been online for more than 350 of that. But whatever.... Also unless they changed it you cant spawn on a bed in a lawless territory because you cant claim land in lawless territory. You can build all you want it just decays faster in unclaimed land. You can spawn on a bed on a ship in lawless though. But again they could have changed this as theyre making the game as easy mode as they can trying to keep people interested. But you can see it now fewer and fewer people even with the big streamers. The thrill of playing with 'celebrities' wore off quick. I imagine some RP and private servers are still holding on to players if they still have enough people to make it interesting. But official servers meh. Its funny watching the whole 'sandbox' fantasy crash and burn. Everyone whines and complains about 'themepark' but in those games at least you have some sort of content. In these types of games the only content is what you can make up. And in most cases whats forced upon you. When learning skills and crafting ships is 80% of the game and they have dumbed that down (and getting dumber tomorrow if the patch is on time) then content becomes nonexistent. These developers dream that people will play the game the way they envision it. Which is never the case. This idea of grand at sea battles between two or more fleets is a fantasy. It has and always will be soft target PvP which is generally offline players or people with extremely low numbers. Which might seem fun but isnt really and gets boring really fast. Then what is there to do? With no competition and owning 25% of the map and having more resources and ships than you have people to use them. Unless they have 'seasons' like some other MMOs do then this game has little to no chance of being anything but a flash in the pan which has already almost burnt out.

Actually a solo player with NPCs everywhere is more than likely going to sail a galleon better than a captain and real life player crew. As it is now Galleons arent even that good. Schooners are exponentially better now with the changes. But as others have said ships outright sinking due to people just walking on and overloading them is just another failed mechanics this game has so add that the the long list.

I dont 'like' to watch streams I do it to see whats going on, and its basically how I described it. If it isnt an American zerg its a foreign one. But how does that change naything? Streamers are in about 80% of the maps or have been so those 25-30 maps they just havent gotten to yet are somehow going to be different? Still doesnt change the fact the population in this game is pathetic and getting worse. But overall thats not a bad thing in the long run. A decent 25 on 25 and a few ships is basically all the servers could handle I suspect. So having fewer people but more dedicated will more than likely improve the gameplay a lot. If people ARE NOT getting harassed while theyre offline by someone then theyre so far away from people they might as well be on a PvE server though. I watch streams from everyone left that is streaming it theyre all over the map (thanks to bed porting) and theyre constantly looking for the next victim. be it the Americans, the Chinese, the Brazilians or Pick anyone playing on the US servers. Even some German and french groups were (not sure if they left or not) NA PvP server.

Yeah I wasnt exactly sure how they worked I know when theyre controlled theyre pretty powerful. But when Wildcard made the decision to not allow NPCs to control mortars they made it known they want these guys to continue to do what theyre doing. 4 or 5 NPC on mortars there would be zero offline raiding or raiding of any sort by ship anyway. Or it would require some actual strategy by raiders (ship placements) to raid someone. Either way the game has a lot of problems and most of them go way beyond the 'early access' excuse.

There are actual ways to defend your ship with the NPCs. I guess they will work as guard dogs on auto. Or maybe some tamed things but I imagined tamed animals dont have much of a chance against mega zergs. I made some suggestions (that would never get implemented) about how raiding should work and how 'pirate' guilds should work. MASSIVE hard cap on populations of both men and ships and territory for any group that routinely goes out destroying stuff every day. Have an incentive to fight pirates or people that destroy stuff every day. Have a reputation system of some sort. At least on the Official PvP servers. Have major restrictions to alliances with timers and lock outs to prevent work arounds for people who try to bypass the restrictions. But since its mostly (completely) streamers that are the biggest 'offenders' to this (regardless of nationality) its likely to never happen at least until these guys stop getting paid (and thus stop streaming) but when that happens the changes would sort of be moot. So its a slippery slope implementing changes that are anecdotal. But obviously if these mega groups continue to infest the official servers then 'rules' need to be set in place. I have said it over and over again this game is unique. Its the first game that can and has been DIRECTLY impacted (gameplay wise) by streamers. Its not like some BR game where it doesnt matter who is playing with whom or some RP game with a 32 to 100 player cap (which isnt PvP based). Its an 'open world' PvP game where guys can literally recruits hundreds and thousands of people to a company or an alliance. The 500 company cap was a joke but so Wildcard. If you have 5 or 6 streamers thats still 2500-3000 people. Obviously all wont be online but it doesnt matter anyway servers cant handle more than 100 people in the first place. The 150 cap is also generous while its possible to get that and more performance drops to zero with that many people on a server even if theyre spread out a bit. But it does make the excuse (because of this limited server pop issue) that these mega companies and mega alliance 'need' to obtain and control more zones. So a 3000 person alliance would claim they need to have 20 zones to be 'balanced', thats ~9% of all the maps in the game. SO 3 or 4 of these companies would then need ~35-40% of the whole game to just support their own groups. Kind of insane. But as for the 'state of the game' it has multiple issues spanning multiple areas. The performance and optimization are better but still not good. The mechanics still suck, the 'content' is non existent. The of course the player influenced problems (I just highlighted the most obvious one). Then of course the duping and the aim botting and other various hacks and cheats that go unfixed and not mentioned.

Show all the guys naming every day of the week as an excuse as to why the population was cratering. Isnt Friday a weekend night? Didnt they just drop a majorly easy mode friendly update? If dso why is it they didnt reach 48K people last night. Even I thought they could possibly hit 50K again. which I guess they still might. But last night everyone got to experience the new changes so if they didnt like them they wont be back. I suppose more might show up tonight but who knows. Monday brings even more easy mode ship building (if it happens on time) but of course thats a week night so no one will be able to play. But another night another bunch of mega companies offline raiding small groups to 'create content'. And then you have these guys complaining about having to blow down walls so they can then shoot undefended ships. So no there is no way this game will ever move in 'the right direction' because these games bring out the absolute worst in people. And its on display 24 hours a day with these guys who are getting paid to play this trainwreck.

Actually with NPCs a solo can man the ships so by that definition the mechanics and design of the game along with the NPC crew directly contradicts everything the OP says....

Its why games that require loss to have content always fail. While we can cry about it being too easy. We also cant turn around and say dont cry when the ship you spent a month grinding for was sunk in 30 seconds. There might be a balance somewhere but no one has found it yet and I am confident these guys wont find it either. The only compromise are hard caps (with low limits) across the board on everything from company pop to alliances to ships people and companies can own all the way down the line. Maybe even a cap on resources themselves. Make it easier and faster to get them but you can only have so many of them at any given time. People dont like caps (mostly because they have the time and numbers to counteract 'having as life'). But having 'gated' (for lack of a better word) is why WoW is still king of the hill today. We all know a full loot PvP game has almost zero chance at success. Then trying to make it easy mode is their effort to keep peoples interest a bit longer. So if a gruop gets wiped they might think they can rebuild pretty quickly and keep playing rather than rage quit or cry on the forums.

LMAO you guys. You cant have it both ways. You cant cite 'work' and holidays to make a point in one direction and then the same work and holidays to explain the opposite. Well you can because youre white knights on a forum. There were 200K plus people lined up on twitch the night it was originally supposed to launch. 30 minutes after it was supposed to launch they made the (predictable) announcement it wasnt coming. Then they had the second (non) launch. Then FINALLY the 'real' launch. There were still more people than their start zones could handle trying to get into the various servers. They somehow managed to get over 30K people online. Numbers rose over the next few days and they peaked on New Years day. Since then numbers have gotten lower and lower each successive night. While some of the excuses might be valid its not likely. But like I said they might tickle 50 again. If they have some super special reason to log in. As for people 'waiting' The game was 17% off immediately, basically begging people to buy it. Even if people were going to wait to play they probably bought it since it was basically 5 bucks off. 25 is a lot easier to excuse than 30 and there had seemed to be some improvement to it. But in the end population as a whole isnt something to cite in an opinion based topic like this. I said it when it first got hyped. Theyll get 100K people (I wasnt even close) and within a month or so they wont have 25K playing it. Still a couple weeks before the month hits. But even a 'prediction' like that fails to take into account a mid sized group of niche players who will stay regardless. But I suspect the ARK denizens who are maybe still playing will be going back to ARK (and probably already have). Game has potential to be decent but track record with Wildcard and Ark make expectations very low.

I guess Moonmoon was paid the 12K for a single 2 hour session/event. He talked about it on a stream the day after he buried Atlas as complete garbage. He said he donated it to charity. So take that for what its worth. But he basically said in the farewell to Atlas the guys who made this game should quit. Pretty funny stuff actually. Cant link I guess but watch his last Atlas video like the last 5 minutes and the first 10-15 minutes of the one the next day.

So them not breaking 60K was even worse? That would be the logic I guess. Why didnt they have 100K players if no one was working?

the 27th was also a Thursday there were 52K people that night. The 26th was a Wed over 54K that night. That was also with all the bugs and lags and DCs and other performance issues. It MIGHT hit 50K with the PvE changes and other changes overall as some people might come back to check it out. But its looking like a crash and burn right now. Private server I was on already taken down first night we had maybe 40 people the last few days I was the only one. Now its gone...

no its because there are still enough soft targets for them, and as we have established most people dont want actual PvP anyway or any sort of a challenge. But sitting behind a bunch of walls isnt really fun either I wouldnt imagine. Its basically just an achievement to dissuade people from zerging you I guess. And where are the sea battles? beyond guys now one shotting damned ships and farming NPCs and gold I dont remember the last time player controlled ships faced off. Actually I do it was when moonmoon happened to run into a few 'chinese' ships somewhere a week ago. But its hard to have those typres of battels anyway. A galleon a coupl ebrigs and a schooner or two as a fleet could have over 100 people on them. Doesnt leave much room for another bunch of ships in a server than has a cap of 150 (but cant even handle the 50-100 in the fleet described).

yeah until people figure out a few hand grenades and some gunpowder barrels are now better than cannons. Forward outposts shouldnt stand a chance and if there is a zerg who can just keep throwing bodies at a plkace it wont last long. I also dont think some of these medium sized companies are utilizing the NPCs (why people insist on calling them AI is beyond me but whatever) to defend their bases. If you have 20-30 people in a company and you farm flotsam and Damned ships for an hour or so you can collect and pay quite a few of them, While I have seen a lot of actual raids I surely have never seen any NPCs being used as defenders. I suspect that like on ships on defenses they also have aimbot which makes them better than real players (who arent using aimbots themselves). Ironically moonmoon approached it semi seriously. He wasnt all rage zerg he took the time made the 'siege' stuff and tried to make it look halfway decent. But his contract stopped or they stopped wanting to pay him but he hasnt played in 3 or 4 days. Rumor was he was paid 12K to stream it. Which would be 1K a stream since he streamed it 12 times. Sounds legit to me actually. I suspect most of the bigger streamers are getting compensated in some way or another. And that is a catch 22. If they leave it lets 'regular' players have a small chance to play. But if they leave and their viewers also leave whats that do to player numbers? They have already dropped over 10K the past two days. Overall. Not sure what the NA PVP servers numbers are specifically but I suspect theyre pretty low. PvE will more than likely go up now that there are ways to claim land from people who might not be around anymore, But the turnover there is also going to be greater because once you build everything and tried everything. Which at this point might take a hundred hours or so, then what? 100 hours for some people is 8-10 days basically.

Thats why numbers have cratered? they didnt even have 45K on last night across all servers. thats pretty bad. When you make 'accomplishments' THIS easy it completely negates the point of the game. Galleons (in reality) should take a group of 25-30 people a month to get. People were getting them in 2 days (duping aside). If everyone has the same footing and it takes everyone the same amount of time then whats the big deal? What else is there to do in a game like this anyway but grind? It certaily isnt PvP. Because I havent seen a MAJOR PvP fight at all. If any group is even a remote threat people ally with them. Then those groups go out and take o ver solo guys or small groups 'because theyre pirates'. LMAO I think ANY group that claims to be a 'pirate' group should have a very limited number of ships. I dont remember pirates having armadas? Sure a few may have occasionally and short term sailed together but you didnt have pirate fleets. If they really want to make it a decent game change the trees so you have to pick either Pirate or some nationality? captain line and have damage modifiers and defense modifiers versus each. Put a hard cap of 10-12 ships in a pirate company, and make their claims better defended by NPC and players but easier to claim once those defenses are breached. Make any alliance they have temporary and put a lock on when they can form anymore alliances. If people want to play 'pirate' make it an actual challenge. But I suppose if everyone was a pirate those things would matter anyway. The very least they should have is some sort of reputation system. So many different 'better' and 'cooler' ways to steer this game. But if they gave incentives (through skill perks) in actually FIGHTING against pirates or guys pretending to be pirates it would actually give the PvP server some actual meaning. Hell I suspect just giving a 'good' side a port or ports that had NPCs and shops and stores (you know like every other MMO in history had cities) and items would be enough to maybe convince some people. The irony to all this is they tried to sell it as some 'hardcore' game when it was already pretty easy (bugs not withstanding). Now theyre making it a private server. Which is really what it already is anyway. A private server for all the streamers who have huge followings and mass invite people to their companies.

Instead of a wipe and actually fixing the duping their answer is to make it so everything is so easy to get you dont have to dupe/cheat to get it. Typical Wildcard response.

LMAO I remember the initial reactions were "wow sailing around is so awesome look at this (chat) isnt the water beautiful?" Next day "OH MY GOD the wind is killing me. Third day "we need more bases bases and beds and boats so we can just teleport all over the game''. Game is fail after fail after fail. Theyre taking the aspects that making it SLIGHTLY different and making them meaningless because they know people dont really want a challenge they want easy mode and insta travel. Instead of making it easier to get around they should make it harder. Especially on the PvP servers.

What do vitamins matter? Dying has ZERO results. That is the first fail. As a self proclaimed 'survival' game dying doesnt matter and its generally the preferred option. Thumbs up Wildcard LOL. But the big companies are all heading north. I looked at one of the maps on the PvP server at the very tip top it had one person on it. I am not sure how many are on it total but at that time there was one guy. But I imagine if there is metal (the biggest excuse) people would be there. But by the looks more than a few streamers are already bored so as long as whats left of their zerg dont join up with the remaining guy there might actually be some PvP on the PvP server. But unlikely. This one is going to go down as one of the biggest hypes that failed in a long list of big hypes that failed. And 100% because of the mechanics of the game. It survived the initial disastrous performance but it cant survive the horrible way the game is being influenced from within using legit mechanics. Hell it has even (I guess) survived a mass duping (which they dont care about apparently). I think their 'fix' was to make it so easy to gather that you wouldnt need to cheat....LMAO another thumbs up Wildcard.

Nope breadth hemorrhaging people at an alarming rate. They never broke 60K people and yesterday they never even got to 45K. Theyre playing to the streamers and their base right now, they dont really care about the game itself by the looks. Its all one big alliance right now. Rather than fight these big time streamers all just join up together. What is the point of that? Then people taking about how someone is too far away to PvP against. Reality is if they ever did meet they wouldnt fight anyway they would just join up. I suspect once one of the big companies meets the mythical 'Chinese' they wont fight either. "PvP" in this game is like most other 'hardcore' PvP games. Offline raiding or rolling over solos or small groups who dont have a chance to threaten you. At least with ARK you could have respectable private servers. This game the servers are overpriced and you need multiples. I play on a 5x5 and it was OK but the pop wasnt high enough and now only 4 or 5 of us log on now. Its a game that absolutely needs a high pop. Problem is when the high pops are all allied with each other it defeats the whole purpose of the game. Which is limited at best.

except in population they didnt break 45K yesterday. Would love to see the numbers for the PvP server specifically.

You can tell everyone who plays this game is a kid because not a single one of the tried and true responses from anyone who ever played nay game worth playing when someone said they were leaving... can i have your stuff that is THE only acceptable response to someone who is leaving and in a game that is completely wrapped around taking other peoples stuff it is even more apropos (look it up) when it comes to this one.

Eve used to have 60K + It is also the only space game around until of course Chris Roberts releases Star...no I just cant type it. Those numbers are also inflated by people with multiple accounts. When I stopped playing about 5 years ago I had 5 or 6 accounts I was actively logging in on and a couple more I forgot passwords to. I knew guys with a lot more than that. Our group had maybe 12-15 active live people but over 100 accounts/classes we could log in on at any given time. As for ARK the person who said they never wiped obviously wasnt around in the beginning because they had at least 3 wipes if not more and two of them were directly due to duping (so they still havent learned how to stop it I guess). I have almost 1500 hours in ARK and I havent played since the first paid expansion. Because any EA game hiding behind EA protection shouldnt be releasing paid anything. But hey they got sued into the stone age (no pun) and needed a quick 40 mil. And the 'they need to focus on server performance.' Hmmm where have we all heard that one before?

Once they get tired of paying streamers to stream it and the servers are empty then they might. I dont think they sold many copies, so theyre right now relying on these streamers to sell (literally and figuratively) the game for them. They never broke 60K people online at any given time. thats with 4 official servers and hundreds of private one. thats pretty pathetic in the grand scheme. The last 'major' MMO to release was ESO and that was five years ago now? That was so bad no one could get on and that game was even that well received by people. Long gone are the days of MMOs having 800K plus players on release obviously but with something like this the way people are frothing at the bit for any MMO worth playing (beyond what already exists) you would think the interest would have been greater. But its ARK DLC basically so theres that I suppose. Oh and I guess its still 'early access' so the actual release will bring way more people just like when Ark di....oh wait NVM

LMAO at people who say "people put too much 'work' in already" Or "people have too many hours for a wipe". Its Early Access the first excuse people come up with to defend this buggy mess. There should have been a wipe on the third day maybe even the second. But just because they havent yet doesnt mean they shouldnt. They gave everyone 2.5 so they could rush through some stuff. Now just reset everything. There should be resets all the time as they test and rework things. Then you would see whats up and who is going to come back and grind again. Thats all these games offer anyway...the grind. One of the reasons why they dont last long. ARK did so well because they reset servers all the time or guys just moved from server to server when they got bored. Once everyone has built everything and wiped everyone they will also get bored and leave. Might free up some land then. But that really isnt the reason to have a wipe anyway. There also arent enough people playing for them to put the resources into more servers. Population has already started to dissipate already. They didnt break 50K players last night, didnt even get to 48K actually. Thats more than 10K off the all time high.

Ironic I know but this is a different situation from most games. You have streamers, from all over the world not just Americans, who are manning massive companies with their subs and basically griefing anyone and everyone smaller than themselves. You have this stigma of 'we are looking for the Chinese' but at this point thats just a joke. Even as bad as these guys are at the game they cant be that stupid as to know theyre no where near any Asians of any kind and a small base with 5-10 people (usually asleep) are not the dreaded zerg people have been fearing. The first few days they were assimilating people into their groups but subs (who paid specifically to play with them and got kicked for being less than 3 months) complained so they stopped that practice. Now it MIGHT be different if not all the streamers (American for sure) werent all allying or outright merging. THEN you might actually have these guys face off. But in the true "PvP" fashion it isnt about PvP at all its about getting the most people you can and not having any sort of fight at all. Nope you sit and watch companies with 500+ people who have a half dozen galleons and dozens of brigs and schooners go out and merge or ally with other streamers who have their own formidable group. Then they all go around wiping the 5-25 man companies that are living around them. Because 'they need to expand because they have too many people'. While streamers have been a part of games for years now never have they had so much potential influence, and its definitely showing now. Now that they have people that actually know what theyre doing running things for them the efficiency is there. Add that too sheer numbers and overwhelming ships and even a decently run smaller company cant defend. Especially if theyre not online to begin with. I know Wildcard and the devs have bent over backwards to accommodate these guys and their 'content creation' but once they kill this game off (live every bunch of griefers has ever done to any PvP game ever) and move on so much for content. Sure youll have the RPers on their small private servers but you wont have anyone on the mega PvP servers, which for normal people looking to play a new MMO will be a blessing I imagine. I know theyre capping the companies at 500 (according to rumors this next patch but who knows how long it will actually be), which might seem OK but still too big. Half that and cap any alliances to 500-800 and you might stem some of it. Of course there could be unofficial alliances but those wouldnt be subject to friendly fire safety. This thing already has enough issues that have caused a lot of people to quit. Cant afford to lose more people to this sort of thing. Numbers have already decreased less than a week in. Dont think they cracked 50K players yesterday. While you need a lot of people to make games like this work you cant have them all members of the same 3 or 4 groups, which is basically waht it is right now. And if there are some people who havent experienced any of this griefing yet its only a matter of time. As these groups continue to expand and go to new zeones/servers theyll get to youy eventually. Until they run out of zones to destroy. The really interesting part will actually be when a couple of these mega groups meet up with each other to see what happens. But it would really have to be the cliche' at this point of US and China because it seems like all the nationality streamers have joined forces with each other. Which is why I say its not about any single country but all streamers in general. But they want views its the nature of it so getting your ass kicked isnt always great content. So they do the locust thing feed off the 14 year old mentality of most of their viewers and the bully nature of their crews and just let things run their course. With other games you could escape this crap by going to another server. But not with this one. Thats why I say its a unique situation right now. Will be interesting to see ho wits handled or if it just handles itself.